2023 Global Talent Playbook Webinar

Key Insights from the 2023 Global Talent Playbook

How should your company weather the challenges and seize the opportunities of 2023 and beyond? Lightcast’s 2023 Global Talent Playbook details how companies can leverage workforce intelligence to arm themselves with the latest data and executive insights to guide their talent strategy. This webinar breaks down the Talent Playbook and highlights key takeaways. Expect to learn about:

1. The global workforce trends affecting the future of work

2. New and emerging skills and job titles

3. Key insights about labor shortages and wage trends

Global trends discussed in the webinar include remote work, green jobs, and artificial intelligence. 

By observing job postings in the US and around the world, we continue to see remote postings growth across occupations and industries. Remote jobs now make up 15% of all postings for roles requiring degrees (up from just 2.5% pre-pandemic). It’s not just high-tech occupations or industries that are seeing remote growth. The top two fastest growing remote occupations in the US from 2019 to 2022 were Medication Aide/Technician and Order Processor/Order Entry Clerk. 

The global shift towards conservation is apparent nearly everywhere: in public policy, in day-to-day life, in business, and of course, in the labor market. Green jobs are growing globally, with Germany, the US, and Canada leading the way. Around the world, companies are prioritizing environmental responsibility. The United States in particular has seen demand for green jobs grow by over 50% since 2019. The accelerated growth of green jobs indicates they will only grow further in the years to come. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making its way into all types of industries. Despite fears that AI would take away jobs, the data shows it is actually adding them. Since 2014, the share of total postings in AI fields has more than tripled in the US, UK, Spain, and Canada. 

Emerging and disruptive skills are changing the world of work, and companies need to identify and plan for them. 

In the webinar, learn more about the top growth skills, both common and specialized, as well as how specific global workforce trends are shaping skill growth. Technology has impacted skill requirements, and in-demand skills are changing. Top specialized skills that employers are hiring for include Machine Learning Ops, NFTs, and Jira Align. General (or “common/human”) skills in high demand are telecommuting, virtual collaboration, and growth mindedness. 

Workforce trends are contributing to the new jobs we’re seeing emerge in the labor market.

Some job titles that have increased in demand are trending towards remote and green workforce trends, like hybrid roles as well as jobs associated with “going green.” For example, three of the top ten emerging jobs are Hybrid Mobile Developer, Virtual School Speech Language Pathologist, and Sustainability Consultant. 

Access the full report to learn all the top skills and jobs for 2023. 

Salary transparency, wage trends, and the expansion of benefits in job postings are other topics addressed in this webinar. 

Advertised wage rates on job postings more than doubled between 2019 and 2022. Over 40% of job postings for non-degree positions, and 25% of postings for degree positions now include an advertised salary. Along with more pay transparency, we’re seeing an overall growth in wages, especially among those from lower wage levels and non-white employees. As for benefits, trends show a rise of specific benefits in job postings to recruit talent. These include tuition assistance, retirement benefits, and sign-on bonuses. 

Employers who are aware of these trends can implement data-driven strategies for better recruitment and retention. Access more labor market insights by watching the full webinar and reading our full 2023 Global Talent Playbook. 

About the Speaker:

Layla O’Kane is a Senior Economist and Research Director on the Economics team at Lightcast, where she manages projects that use labor market analytics to further public policy. Recent research topics include the diffusion of artificial intelligence, remote work growth, and skill disruption. Layla has presented her work at conferences organized by the UN, OECD, and APEC among others and has had her work featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other national media.

Layla holds a BA in Economics and in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and an MPA in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Transcript:

Vince Paradiso - Hi everyone, and welcome to our webinar on the 2023 Global Talent Playbook. Formerly Emsi Burning Glass, we are now called Lightcast. We have over two decades of experience in finding solutions and delivering the competitive edge our clients demand. So if you're not familiar with us, please be sure to check us out. Our products provide the world's most detailed information about occupations, skills in-demand, career pathways and more. Providing labor market insight to employers, educational institutions, and government agencies to help them to succeed. We're the global pioneer in the collection of big data analysis of information on the labor market. Our data provides the world's most detailed information about occupations, skills in-demand, and career pathways. 

We have today with us Layla O’Kane. She's one of our senior economists and research director on the economics team at Lightcast. She manages projects that use labor market analytics to further public policy. Recent research topics have included the diffusion of artificial intelligence, remote work growth, and skill disruption.

She has presented her work at conferences organized by the UN, the OECD, and APAC among others. She has had her work featured in top journals and news articles like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other national media. She holds a BA in Economics and International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA in international development from the Harvard Kennedy School.

So please join me in welcoming Layla O’Kane.  

Layla O'Kane -  Thank you so much, Vince. It's great to be here. And thanks everybody for joining. So today we're talking about a really exciting topic, the 2023 Global Talent Playbook, which we just launched, and I'm excited to dig in with you all.

Today we’ll cover a little bit about Lightcast and what big labor market data is and the kinds of things that you can do with it. And then we'll also dive a little bit more deeply into the Talent Playbook to talk about some global trends that have affected the future of work, some new and emerging skills and job titles that we're seeing pop up in the labor market, and a little bit about what we've seen with labor shortages and some wage trends.

So what is Lightcast? What is it that we do? 

We are a big data labor market company, and what that means is we have all of this big data that we put together using natural language processing, develop a taxonomy, do some complex modeling on top of that, which all sounds very fancy, but basically results in really interesting and unique insights that we can provide to folks like yourselves. Talent policy people, workforce development people, and other folks that are looking at the market are trying to understand what are the future work trends that they should be looking out for. 

We are based in Boston, Massachusetts, as well as in Moscow, Idaho and we have over 700 employees spread out across four continents, including here in the US and then in the UK, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and India.

What Problems Does Lightcast Solve?

Using all of this information, we kind of focus our efforts on solving four key problem areas. The first one is bridging the gap with skills. So there's a lot of different sorts of vocabulary that people use to talk about the types of things that they bring to the table in the labor market.

Employers and educators don't always have a common language, and so we try to make sure that using skills people on either side of that, employer or employee, educator or student, and individuals can kind of all understand what it is that they're talking about and connect across those two sides of the market.

We also aim to provide just general labor market information. So, overall these things can impact efficiencies in business outcomes if you don't understand what it is that's in-demand or what your competitors are doing or what educators are providing students with. And so we try to make sure that everyone has an even playing field in terms of the information available to them.

We really like looking at the future of work trends. So right now I think we've all experienced that our work has shifted really rapidly, especially with Covid. I work remotely now, and I didn't before and there's lots of things that kind of come along with these trends, including technological disruption, demographic trends, climate crises.And so we try to make sure that people are aware and prepared for these future of work trends. 

And last but not least, we really are trying to create a labor market that works for everyone. And what that means is that right now some people are left behind people who might not have the right skills, maybe folks that don't have a bachelor's degree, people who are displaced in a world that's really rapidly changing. And so we try to make sure that we're prioritizing upward mobility, equity, diversity, and inclusion in looking at the labor market.

So what is this data source that we use? Where do we get it? Basically we aggregate data from online job postings. And what that means is we go out and we look at job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn. We look at individual employer websites and we collect and scrape all of those job postings from all these online sources, and we de-duplicate them to make sure that we're not double counting a posting that you might see on Indeed and then also listed on an employer website.

And once we have all this information and it's de-duplicated, we parse it into these standard, detailed data variables so we can see things like what is the job title, what is the employer and the industry, what are the skills that those jobs are all asking for, and what are the CER certifications that they're asking for? And this helps us to be able to understand these trends and use this data analysis to unpack things that are going on in the labor market as a whole.

We work with a wide range of global organizations, and this is just a subset. But here in North America we work with a bunch of education providers, with local governments and also with big businesses, and think tanks. And similarly across Europe, APAC, and globally, we work with a lot of large international organizations to try to help understand the labor market.

Future of Work Trends

So the first part of the Global Talent Playbook that I want to highlight is some of these future of work or global trends that we've been seeing. We’ll go over remote work, green jobs, and artificial intelligence. I know that a lot of media attention has been focused on companies that have been asking workers to return to the office, but we're actually seeing overall that remote work is here to stay.

So on the left hand side there's a graph that shows the remote posting shares in the US and you can see here that jobs requiring a degree. So jobs that require a bachelor's degree or above have been increasing rapidly, especially since the onset of the pandemic to allow for more remote work. We are also seeing an increase in remote work in jobs that don't require a degree, not to the same extent, but still a substantial increase from what it was pre-pandemic. And we're not seeing that decrease here. 

In Europe we're also seeing similar trends. So many of the countries in Europe have more than doubled the share of remote postings that they have seen since 2019 and well into 2022, sort of post the depths of the pandemic. We're not seeing a ton of decrease in those shares.

And I know that a lot of effort has been made to focus on remote work in high tech occupations or industries. So the idea that we're all kind of working behind screens, and that is definitely true of many of the top occupations that allow for remote work in the US. Things like a web developer or a computer programmer are kind of obvious that they allow for remote work. It makes sense. 

We're also seeing a lot of fast growing remote occupations that may not be quite as technical or may not be quite as focused on technical industries. So occupations like a medication aide, an order processor, or an order entry clerk, credit analyst, even a tax manager. These are all roles that have been growing substantially in terms of the amount that they're allowing for remote work. And we're expecting to see that continued growth.

The second broad trend we've been seeing is that demand for what we call green jobs has grown by over 50% in the US since 2019. So these are jobs that you can think of supporting the green economy, things like solar panel installers or wind turbine technicians. And since before the pandemic, we've been seeing substantial growth in the US as well as substantial growth across many European countries. For example, Germany already started with a very high share in 2019 of green jobs, but has grown such that almost 4% of their entire economy could be called a green job.

Last but not least, artificial intelligence has created a ton of new jobs globally. I know that probably a lot of you have been playing around with Chat GPT and the most accessible form perhaps of AI that we've seen recently. And it's not limited specifically to Chat GPT. So we've been seeing AI grow really substantially since 2014.

We've been tracking this. And this is us looking at postings that involve things like robotics or machine learning, or natural language processing, or electric self-driving automated vehicles. So sort of a really wide range of applications of artificial intelligence. And we're seeing substantial growth across a wide range of geographies with the US, UK, Spain, and Canada really leading the charge.

Skills and Jobs Trends

The next section that we talk about in our global talent report is how quickly skills are changing and what that means for the sort of new jobs that might be emerging. The sort of setting for this is just that skills have changed substantially within jobs in the last five years alone. So this piece comes from some earlier research that my team did with the Boston Consulting Group that we published last year.

And in that we looked at all jobs across the economy. We looked at the top skills that were requested in 2016 and then again in 2021, and we found that on average, 37% of those top skills had changed in those five years alone. And so this is just demonstrating that skill disruption is happening very quickly.

And this is within jobs. So if you were a marketing specialist in 2016 and you're still a marketing specialist in 2021, we expect that on average about 37% of your skills have changed in that time period and that maybe you need to be thinking about, you know, where you can upskill or reskill to make sure that you're keeping up with that trend.

And so in order to sort of dig more deeply into this, in the last year, we looked specifically at the skills that had changed and grown the most just in the last year alone. And we see some trends here in the skills that are sort of rising to the top. So a couple of them are remote work trends, so things like telecommuting or virtual collaboration. The top two skills are growing on the left hand side there are really sort of in support of this new remote universe, this new remote economy that we're living in. 

Other skills that we're seeing are sort of putting the pressure on workers to really improve themselves and work quickly, and sort of adapt to new circumstances. So that's skills like growth mindedness, intrapreneurship, which is not a typo. It basically means acting like an entrepreneur within an organization. So instead of starting a new organization as an entrepreneur would, you're acting as an intrapreneur. So basically, iterating, testing out new ideas, trying out things within the sphere of the organization that you already work in.

We're also seeing some AI skills pop up to the top. So that's things like machine learning ops on the right hand side. Of course, TikTok has been mentioned frequently in the media and is a top social media skill that we've seen rise to the top as well in job postings. And other sorts of things that have come up a lot in pop culture, like NFTs, we’re also seeing come up in job posting demand pretty substantially as well.

The other two skills that we see here that have grown a lot just in the last year are Jira Align and Microsoft Power Platform, both of which support tech ops delivering on their roles and also sort of a focus on data visualization, which is something that we've been seeing in the economy as well.

And through all this skill change, we're also seeing some new jobs that are emerging. So we looked at what are the job titles that have come up in the last year at an increased rate relative to the year before. So things that are now sort of a job title that we didn't really see before.  I think one of the most striking examples of this is a virtual school speech language pathologist.

So we knew, of course, about school speech language pathologists, but now with remote work being such a commonplace part of the labor market, we're seeing that that is actually also happening virtually. We're also seeing some focus on green jobs here. So for example, sustainability consultant and energy and sustainability manager. Both of those are roles that are sort of new and upcoming and focus on the green economy. 

And then we're also seeing a focus on global. So, global learning and development manager and global talent acquisition manager kind of point to the idea that we're living more in a global talent marketplace, right? It used to be even just in 2019 that people were really focused on their local labor market and drawing from local talent. And now we are seeing that in fact, you must be really looking globally and it sort of is in support of employers being able to access a global talent market, and that they're also hiring to be able to access that through a global talent acquisition manager.

We're also seeing some roles that I would call sort of a hybrid role, which means that it took a role that existed before and sort of added on some new skill sets and maybe, you know, merged two roles that existed before. So that's something like a data scientist consultant, right? So not only are data scientists a common role, but now you have sort of a data scientist consultant that might come in and have a little bit more understanding of all of the data science tools available, be able to maybe diagnose the problem that you're having, and provide some insight and guidance without necessarily being a lead data scientist on that position.

We're also seeing an increase in roles that kind of get a chief title. So something like a chief software engineer, especially in some tech companies, has become a more commonplace role.

Wage Trends 

The last section that I want to cover talks a little bit about some wage trends that we've been seeing and how those have interacted with labor shortages. So the first one that I think has been really on a lot of people's minds, especially in the last year, is salary transparency. And we've been seeing that this is the new norm.

So there has been a substantial increase in the postings that include advertised wages in that posting directly. So you can see, you know, I would make in the range of $12 to $13 an hour, for example, directly in that posting. And that's particularly increased for workers that don't have a bachelor's degree or above, or job postings that are seeking out workers that don't have a bachelor's degree or above.

And some of this is due to policy changes. So for example, here in New York City where I live, there's a new policy that means employers must include a wage on their postings as of  November 1st. And so we did see an increase in New York specifically as a result of that. And there are other states that also mandate this, but it's not limited to those states.

So overall close to 40% of job postings that don't require a bachelor's degree now include a wage specifically in the posting. And we're seeing that across the US and this kind of goes hand in hand with some other wage trends that we've seen this year that go against some of the trends that we had seen before.

So, on that top graph, we see that wage growth is broken out by quartile. And the only thing I want you to notice here is that we've seen the most wage growth for the first quartile. And the first quartile are people who make the lowest wages out of the entire labor market. So people who are working hourly, maybe making minimum wage or slightly above, have seen substantial wage growth in the last year relative to people who are making wages in other parts of the distribution. 

And we're also seeing a trend where non-white workers have experienced higher wage growth in the last year than white workers and then workers overall. And so, overall, folks who are non-white, low wage workers have experienced substantial wage growth. And a lot more postings are advertising their wages, which is, you know, enabling people to compare and contrast wages and say, “Hey, you know, I work at this Dunkin Donuts, I make eight or $9 an hour, but the McDonald's across the street is advertising $10 an hour for a similar position. I can move to that and make more money.”

Employer Benefits Trends

The last section I want to talk about is some benefits that employers have been offering. So during the pandemic there were substantial labor shortages and so a lot of employers started, especially in specific industries like healthcare, and a lot of employers started offering additional benefits to try to attract more workers and increase their ability to hire the people that they really needed.

And so some of the things that they started doing were things like offering tuition assistance, offering additional retirement benefits, and then including a sign-on bonus. And so you'll see here that especially for tuition assistance and retirement benefits, those benefits haven't gone away, so we're not seeing a decrease in those.

And in particular, we've seen a high increase in those benefits for folks who don't have a bachelor's degree, which kind of goes hand in hand with the wage results that we saw on the previous slide. For sign-on bonuses, we've seen that there's been a little bit of a decrease between 2021 and 2022. Overall, there's still a pretty high rate of sign-on bonuses relative to pre-pandemic. So pre-pandemic, we were for non degree workers, we were at less than 2%, and we're still above 4% of postings that offer a sign-on bonus. And so this is kind of pointing to the fact that we still have a pretty tight labor market. Employers are still really working to recruit talent. And these are some of the ways that employers have been using these tools to try to get more people to apply.

That's it on the Global Talent Playbook, and I'm happy to take questions. But before I do that, I just want to talk a little bit about what's next for Lightcast and some of our upcoming work. So my team is working on a few upcoming reports that we're really excited about. One is Better Bets for Program Development, so trying to help educators understand where successful programs are and what they look like and sort of how they can help create a successful program. We're looking at more artificial intelligence diffusion and adoption, especially in the European labor market. 

And then we're also hoping to put out a report on global talent acquisition strategies. So now that we live in this global labor market, how can we make the best of that? Where are there opportunities, say, for people to be hiring folks who live in Latin America, for example? Similar time zone to North America and a lot of talent. 

We're also focusing more on our global data and products, so we're working to increase the countries that we have data in and increase granularity across our global data set and really try to focus on some more cross country comparisons to help us learn across the globe, what other countries have been doing on some of these issues and how that has worked. 

And then we really love to provide you real time insights, right? So big labor market data. One of the great things about it is that you don't have to wait a month for the government survey to finish. You can get data updates in real-time. And so right now we do that for JOLTS and for employment analysis. We do those live, and we'd love to add more real time insights from our own data and do some more live reporting for you.

If you have any questions for me on the research or for folks about how to access some of this data yourself through our tools, we would love to hear that from you. And thank you so much for listening. 

Q & A

Vince Paradiso - Thank you, Layla. Very informative. Any questions from those of our viewers that you might have for Layla about the implications of the Global Talent Playbook that we can help with?

All right. You must have hit them all. Let's hang on. We have, we have something coming in.

Maybe to kind of help with the time while we wait for some questions to come in later. What are you most excited about with these upcoming reports that you guys are working on?

Layla O'Kane - Oh man, that's hard. That's like asking to choose my favorite child. I think for this, you know, the one that ties most closely probably to this report is our global talent acquisition report that we're working on.

And I'm really excited about that. I think that there's a lot of opportunity to sort of help support some of the labor shortage challenges that employers have been facing. There's a lot of opportunity to do that by looking to other places to hire from, and I'm just excited that we'll be able to kind of show where employers can do that strategically and some of the opportunities that they have to hire from outside their local labor markets. 

Vince Paradiso - Awesome. We have a question. So maybe go into a little bit of our data. So, it seems from the audience not being that familiar with us, that a lot of our data is web scraped from online job postings. So based upon actually where we gathered data from and how you'll answer that, maybe address also any concerns or caveats we have working exclusively with such data, which we don't. 

Layla O'Kane - Sure. So I did focus pretty heavily on that in this report, and that is sort of one of our main sources of data, but that is not the only source of data.

So a couple things on that one is we scrape all these online job postings, but then we also benchmark against public data so we can understand how our data is compared to public data sources. And make sure that the job postings data is sort of broadly representative of the labor market. But we also add in a couple other data sources.

So one is public data. Public data is super useful and really important. We use government data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use industry data to try to round out some of our insights and sort of understand the labor market better. And then we also have social profile data which understands an individual's career pathway and can help us look better at questions like mobility or how working for a specific employer impacts your career later on. And that helps us understand the labor market better too. 

Vince Paradiso - So you wouldn't have any concerns or caveats with working with the data that we're able to garner both publicly and online?

Layla O'Kane - You know, there are always caveats with any data source, right? So, the caveats with public data are that it tends to sort of lag behind sort of the current timeline, right? And usually it's focused really heavily on being representative, which is great, but doesn't necessarily have as much granularity because it's really costly to put out a survey.

So there are great things, pros and cons. Similarly, there are pros and cons with job posting data, right? So some of the pros are that we do get a ton of granularity, and we get that in real time. But of course we can't, we're not guaranteeing that that's a perfect representative sample. And in fact, we know that there are jobs that are just less likely to be posted online. Things that are, you know, a help wanted sign in a shop window. We're not going to capture that. And that's still common in some industries and in some places. And so we know that going in and we kind of make sure that any of the conclusions that we're drawing, we feel like are generalizable despite some of those caveats.

Vince Paradiso - Awesome. Thank you. Next one. So what would be your thoughts on offshore and onshore work and how would you advise companies around evaluating those firms and which skill sets do people offshore need? 

Layla O'Kane - Yeah, I will answer that in a short way, and I will tell you that our global talent acquisition report will hopefully answer that in a more thorough and long way.

So in short, I think we've been seeing that remote work has been really successful for a wide range of roles. So, you know, I think before the pandemic we might've said, well, you can work remotely if you're maybe like, IT support from afar, but that's kind of it, let's say. And now we've seen success across a broader range of roles.

So I think there's a lot of room to expand our thinking on what success looks like. And there's a lot of additional communication tools that have been developed to support teams collaborating across many time zones or across different languages. And so I think we have a lot of opportunities there to just think of the world as a little bit more of a global talent market.

That being said, I think there are roles that are maybe harder to be fully remote. And that depends a little bit on your organization and the structure. But of course, if you're working in a production plant and manufacturing, you can't make that role remote. That's not an option. And so if you have your plant in Moscow, Idaho, and you need folks to be working in person, maybe you're limited by that. And that's just something that we're gonna have to live with. 

Vince Paradiso - That kind of ties into the next question we got as far as the potential of remote work, maybe increasing because of the labor shortages. But again, to your point, it really is going to depend upon the company itself and what their needs are and where they're basing everything else, correct?

Layla O'Kane - Yeah, that's right. I mean, I do think that as I kind of said earlier, remote work is here to stay and people are going to continue to kind of compete in a bigger labor market than they used to be competing on because they can work remotely, right? So, you know, I said earlier our company is based in Moscow, Idaho, and in Boston, Massachusetts.

I live in New York, I work remotely. I go to Boston once a quarter. And I can do that now and I can be really successful at doing that. So I do think remote work is not going anywhere, but of course every business has different needs for their talent and it's not the case that everyone will be remote forever, either.

Vince Paradiso - Kind of with what you covered before as far as degreed workers versus non-degreed and everything else, and then even along with skills, are you seeing companies in general trying to help their unskilled workers more to kind of keep those in there or more of a shifting around of resources?

Layla O'Kane - Yeah, I do. The short answer is yes. I mean to elaborate, I think that companies have realized that the days of being able to have their choice of talent for any open role are not right now. Right now, you know, a lot of companies are really hurting to get more talent and are unable to find them.

And so I think there has been a lot more effort to think about what is the talent that they already have and how can they kind of provide some professional development or some unique opportunities internally to make sure that their talent base fits the need of the employer and the workforce without going out and hiring that talent because they just can't find it.

Vince Paradiso - Okay. And then along those lines, we're still on the skills subject because it's a hot topic these days. What skills or competencies are you seeing that are maybe becoming either less valuable or less in-demand? And what would be skills or competencies that were maybe prized 20 years ago, kind of along those lines, but today they're insignificant. Obviously, you know, typewriter skills, I'm sure are outdated. But that was the one, the first one that came to mind.

Layla O'Kane - I would think of this more as instead of skills being outdated or being replaced, it's more that there are new skills you need to learn to augment or compliment what you already have. Right? So what we've been seeing is maybe it used to be the case that you were a data analyst and your whole role was focusing on sort of maybe data entry, data cleaning, data processing, data analysis, and that was kind of where your function stopped. And now we've seen a lot more roles that also require you to have good data visualization skills to communicate those results out to other stakeholders, to bring in sort of senior leadership and say, this is what I'm seeing in the data, and therefore this is what we should do as a next step.

Right. So there's that kind of communication piece. Maybe a data visualization piece. And so it's not necessarily the case that I think we see by and large, oh, you don't need data analysis anymore. Like of course you still do, but you need to augment that with these sort of pieces that connect you to other teams and that allow you to be a strategic part of the business rather than just sort of doing something that creates a graph that you don't interpret and that you don't make a strategic decision based on.

Vince Paradiso - Really the ability to not just take the skills themselves, but be able to apply them to different scenarios and situations to really help the company grow. And your own, your own personal growth. 

Exactly. Great. Would you be able to speak a little bit more on the uptick in merged skill jobs? Trying to understand how those blended roles appear this year, kind of the DS consultant example was great that you gave. Are there any, are there any generalized trends kind of associated with that? 

Layla O'Kane - Yeah, absolutely. So, some of the big skill trends that we've seen across all roles there are basically four big skill trends that we've seen across all roles. And this is drawing again on some of the research we did with Boston Consulting Group that we published earlier this year.

But one of them is digital skills in non-digital occupations. And I think we can all appreciate that, probably having experienced it, no matter how digital our job is, new technologies that we've had to learn, even just project management softwares. I know as a marketing specialist, as I kind of talked about 10 years ago, you might have had a somewhat digital job and now you have a super digital job, right? You probably are looking at a bunch of digital marketing metrics that you didn't even know existed 10 years ago. And so a lot of digital skills have just kind of come into these jobs that weren't as digital before. 

We've also seen the flip side, which is the data scientist consultant example. So a lot more communication or human skills are coming into very technical jobs, right? So it's not enough to just know the technical side. A lot of people are being asked to also be able to work really well in a team or be a leader. You know, now that you are a really successful data scientist, maybe you're leading a team of data scientists and that requires sort of addition of these management skills and these leadership skills that have become more important and are being kind of blended.

The third big trend that we've seen across all rows is social media skills. And it's not limited to just TikTok, although that is one we saw this year, but across the board people like a receptionist at a small hotel are being asked to also run social media accounts, right? And so that's in some places Facebook is the only place in which an employer posts their job postings because it's the easiest way to get talent hired. And so they kind of have to navigate social media in a way that’s new and different has sort of changed the focus of their job. 

And then the last one is data visualization. And I kind of touched on this in my previous example, but people are being asked to present data. We're inundated with data, and I can say firsthand that I am happily inundated with data, and that's sort of fun for me.

But as a society, we just have all this data and it's hard to figure out what to do with it. And so, people are being asked to be able to visualize that data and, and sort of aid in communicating what are the results of this analysis to other people, and at a much more, you know, high rate. So even if you're a sales person, you might be making some really nice data visuals to kind of show your prospects what the product can do for you in a way that you didn't before because you didn't have access to that data before.

Vince Paradiso - Yeah, and I'm gonna actually use this as an opportunity for a shameless advertisement of just if they're out there needing to hire people we provide that data that they could get publicly through all these other government sources online and everything else. But we take that and aggregate it in such a way that they can actually use these and apply them to their businesses, to their communities, to their colleges, to everything that they need in a nice, clear, concise way, that they're not having to pull all this data and get this overload that's out there.

One more question that you kind of alluded to before you work in New York. We're based in Idaho and in Massachusetts. The US has seemed to have done a good job in some ways of making sure, like even though you're maybe working in one city, but getting paid by where the company's based, but living in another place, you still have to figure out the tax situation with that.

One of our questions, regards around that on a global scale, on like high level insight and how challenging it might be to open it up to other global areas, like if, you know they're in America but they want to employ somebody in Europe for remote work and maybe the challenges that might occur with that or APAC or anywhere else?

Layla O'Kane - Sure, yeah. I mean, there are a ton of regulatory differences across those economies in those countries. And, of course, that can be a challenge. I do know that there are a bunch of organizations that have kind of stepped in to try to fill some of that challenge. So people who will basically be the employer of record for a hire and deal with all the tax challenges, but still basically, sort of be that middleman, and they'll be contracted out to work for an employer in the US and so that will allow the employer in the US to not have to deal with any of that. And the person to still work in the country that they live in or the country that they choose. And so there are people kind of filling that gap. I don't think that as a sort of global labor market we have faced that regulatory challenge or solved that regulatory challenge. But I think as it becomes more common, that's something that employers and workers both benefit from, then that's something that, you know, policy will catch up to.

Vince Paradiso - Awesome. Thank you. And that's all the time we have for questions. Thank you, Layla, for your time. Thank you everybody for attending. Please join us next time, and we have more reports coming out, more helpful information to help you be the best you can, hiring the right talent, developing that talent, reaching those communities and everything else.

Have a good day everyone. Thanks.